27.11.2019
What is the sin of the first people. What is original sin? The image of God in man is corrupted but not destroyed
What is original sin?
The term "original sin" refers to the sin of Adam's disobedience (having eaten the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil), which affects all of humanity. Original sin can be defined as "the sin and guilt that we possess in God's eyes as a result of Adam's sin in the Garden of Eden." The doctrine of original sin in particular focuses on its consequences for our being and our status before God even before we reach the age of conscience to commit our own sins. There are three main theories regarding these consequences.
Pelagianism: The consequences of Adam's sin on the souls of his descendants are merely a sinful example that led them to sin in the same way. A person is able to stop sinning just by willing it. This teaching is in conflict with a number of texts that note that man is hopelessly enslaved to his sins (without divine intervention) and that his good works are "dead" or worthless in order to earn God's favor (Ephesians 2:1-2; Matthew 15:18- 19; Romans 7:23; Hebrews 6:1; 9:14).
Arminianism: Adam's sin caused all mankind to inherit a predisposition to sin, called the "sinful nature." This sinful essence makes us sin in the same way that the essence of a cat makes it meow - it happens naturally. According to this view, man cannot stop sinning on his own, so God gives universal grace to all to help us stop. In Arminianism, this grace is called preliminary grace. According to this view, we are not responsible for Adam's sin, only for our own. This teaching is inconsistent with the fact that all people are punished for sin, even though they might not have sinned in the way that Adam did (1 Corinthians 15:22; Romans 5:12-18). Similarly, the doctrine of prior grace is not supported by the Bible.
Calvinism: Adam's sin resulted not only in our having a sinful nature, but also in our bearing the resulting guilt before God, for which we deserve to be punished. Being born with original sin (Psalms 50:7) results in us inheriting a sinful nature—so corrupt that Jeremiah 17:9 says, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and exceedingly corrupt.” Not only is Adam guilty because he sinned, but his guilt and punishment (death) belongs to us as well (Romans 5:12, 19). There are two views on why Adam's guilt should apply to us. According to the first, mankind was with Adam in the form of a seed, so when Adam sinned, we also sinned. This is biblical, as Levi paid tithes to Melchizedek for Abraham, his ancestor (Genesis 14:20; Hebrews 7:4-9), even though he was born hundreds of years later. Another key view is that Adam was our representative and thus we bear the blame for him.
According to Calvinist theory, a person cannot overcome sin without the power of the Holy Spirit - a power that is obtained only when a person places faith in Christ and His atoning sacrifice on the cross. The Calvinist view of original sin is more than others biblical teaching. However, how can God hold us responsible for a sin that we did not personally commit? There is a strong interpretation that we become responsible for original sin when we choose to accept and act upon our sinful nature. In the life of each of us there comes a moment when we begin to realize our sinfulness. At that moment, we must reject the sinful nature and repent. Instead, we all "accept" this sinful nature, convincing ourselves that it is not so bad after all. By accepting our sinfulness, we express agreement with the actions of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Thus, we are guilty of this sin, in fact, without committing it.
QUESTION: What is original sin and what does Baptism have to do with it?
ANSWER: A distinction must be made between the original sin of our first parents, Adam and Eve, and the original sin that we all inherited. In the first case, this is a committed original sin, and in the second, it is received. The original sin committed by Adam and Eve was an act of pride. Our forefathers, tempted by the devil, imagined themselves in the place of God, that is, they claimed to decide instead of Him what is good and what is evil. God forbade man to eat the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil: “On the day you eat from it, you will die by death,” God warned (Genesis 2:17).
The tree of the knowledge of good and evil symbolizes the insurmountable limit of man as a creature. And this limit must be recognized and respected with hope in God. Man depends on the Creator, he obeys the laws of creation and the moral rules that govern the use of freedom.
Man's original sin is disobedience to God's command and lack of confidence in His goodness. And every human sin also bears this double stigma: disobedience to God and lack of trust in His goodness.
Original sin entailed numerous consequences: Adam and Eve, having disobeyed God, lost His friendship, the grace with which they shone and which made them like God. Disobedient to God, they became disobedient towards themselves, and their relationships with others were also violated. People lost the power of the spirit over the body: they saw themselves naked and felt the need to protect their dignity with primitive clothing. From the moment of the fall, the relationship between man and woman became tense: Adam and Eve immediately began to blame each other. Their relationship also included mutual enslavement.
Having lost unity with God, the source of life, people doomed themselves to death and to all the circumstances that prepare for it, that is, suffering, inconvenience, illness. Thus death entered the history of mankind.
Adam and Eve stand at the origins of the human race. And just as only contaminated water can come from a contaminated well, humanity corrupted by sin gives rise to the same corrupted humanity. This is the received original sin that all people inherit.
As for the transmission of the sin of Adam and Eve to posterity, then in Old Testament there are no explicit statements about this, but the concept of the transmission of original sin is present in the Book of Genesis and in subsequent books of Scripture: they show that the disobedience of the forefathers gave rise not only to physical and material deplorable consequences, but also moral ones: hatred, revenge, greed, envy, fornication and so on.
The doctrine of original sin is explicitly stated in the New Testament. St. Paul writes to the Romans: “As by one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned” (Rom 5:12). And again: "Like Jews, so Greeks, all are under sin" (3:9). That is why all people need salvation, which is granted only by Jesus Christ:
whom God offered as a propitiation in His blood through faith, to show His righteousness in the forgiveness of sins that were committed before" (Rom 3:23ff).
The doctrine of original sin has occupied an important place in Christian catechesis from the very beginning of the existence of the Church. And the first to develop the doctrine of original sin on the basis of three arguments was Blessed Augustine. These three arguments are Holy Scripture (the Book of Genesis and the Epistles of the Holy Apostle Paul, which we have already spoken about); the practice of infant baptism, which was certainly based on the conviction that children are not born in a state of innocence, but in a state of sin; and, finally, the universal experience of evil and pain, which clearly bears witness to the universal guilt of which each person is an accomplice.
The doctrine of St. Augustine has become one of the core aspects of Catholic theology. In turn, St. Thomas Aquinas reflects it in his writings, placing more emphasis not on the inclination to evil, but on the absence of sanctifying grace (provided by God for all people).
To quote the Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church:
“A man, tempted by the devil, allowed trust in the Creator to die in his heart and, disobeying Him, wished to become “like God” without God, and not live according to the will of God (Genesis 3:5). So Adam and Eve immediately lost - both for themselves and for all their descendants - the primordial grace of holiness and righteousness.
Original sin, in which all people are born, is a state of deprivation of original holiness and righteousness. This sin is "received" by us, not "committed"; it is a state of birth, not a personal act. Due to the unity of the human race, it is transmitted from Adam to the descendants along with human nature, "not by imitation, but by the continuation of the race." This transmission remains a mystery that we cannot fully understand.
As a result of original sin, human nature, not being completely corrupted, is damaged in its natural powers and is subject to ignorance, suffering, the power of death, and is prone to sin. This tendency is called lust.
After the first sin, the world was flooded with sins, but God did not leave man in the power of death, but, on the contrary, mysteriously predicted - in the First Gospel (Genesis 3:15) - that evil would be defeated, and man would be raised from a fallen state. This is the first proclamation of the Messiah Redeemer. Therefore, the fall into sin will even be called a happy fault, since it "deserved such a glorious Redeemer."
The sin of our forefathers was an infinitely significant and fateful act, because it violated the entire God-given relationship of man to God and to the world. Before the fall, the whole life of our forefathers was based on the divine-human order: God was in everything, and they felt, recognized and accepted it with joy and admiration; God directly revealed His will to them, and they obeyed it consciously and voluntarily; Their God guided them in everything, and they joyfully followed Him with their whole being. The Fall violated and rejected the Divine-human order of life, and the devil-human order was accepted, because by the willful transgression of the commandment of God, the first people announced that they wished to achieve Divine perfection, to become “like gods” not with the help of God, but with the help of the devil, which means bypassing God, without God, against God. Their whole life before the fall consisted in the voluntary and gracious fulfillment of the will of God; this was the whole law of life, for this was the whole law of God concerning men. By transgressing the commandment of God, that is, the will of God, the first people transgressed the law and entered into lawlessness, for "sin is lawlessness" (1 John 3:4). The law of God - good, service to good, life in good - is replaced by the law of the devil - evil, service to evil, life in evil. The commandment of God is a law, for it expresses the will of the Good and Most Good God; violation of this commandment is sin and is a violation of the law of God, is lawlessness. By disobedience to God, which manifested itself as a creation of the will of the devil, the first people voluntarily fell away from God and clung to the devil, led themselves into sin and sin into themselves (cf. Rom. 5:19) and thereby fundamentally violated the entire moral law of God, which is nothing else than the will of God, requiring only one thing from a person - conscious and voluntary obedience and unforced obedience. “Let no one think,” Blessed Augustine declares, “that the sin of the first people is small and light, because it consisted in eating the fruit from the tree, and moreover, the fruit was not bad or harmful, but only forbidden; obedience is demanded by the commandment, such a virtue, which among rational beings is the mother and guardian of all virtues.In reality, original sin means man's rejection of the God-determined goal of life - becoming like God on the basis of a god-like human soul - and replacing this with likeness to the devil. For by sin people have transferred the center of their life from a god-like nature and reality to a reality outside of God, from being into non-existence, from life into death, they have renounced God and lost their way in the gloomy and dissolute distance of fictitious values and realities, since sin has thrown them far away from God. Created by God for immortality and god-like perfection, people, according to St. Athanasius the Great, turned away from this path, stopped at evil and united themselves with death, for the transgression of the commandment turned them away from being to non-being, from life to death. “Through sin, the soul turned away from itself, from its image of God, and became outside of itself,” and, having closed the eye with which it could look at God, it invented evil for itself and turned its activity towards it, imagining that it was doing something, while in reality in fact, she is floundering in darkness and decay. “Through sin, human nature turned away from God and found itself out of intimacy with God.”
Sin in its essence is unnatural and unnatural, since there was no evil in God-created nature, but it appeared in the free will of some beings and represents a retreat from God-created nature and a rebellion against it. “Evil is nothing else,” says St. John of Damascus - as a turn from the natural to the unnatural, for there is nothing evil by nature. For “And God saw all things, He made the tree ... very good” (Gen. 1:31); and everything that remains in the state in which it was created is “very good”; but that which voluntarily departs from the natural and turns into the unnatural, is in evil. Evil is not some God-given essence or property of an essence, but a self-willed aversion from the natural to the unnatural, which, in fact, is sin. Sin is an invention of the free will of the devil. Therefore, the devil is evil. In the form in which he was created, he was not evil, but good, for the Creator created him as a bright, shining, reasonable and free angel, but he willfully deviated from natural virtue and found himself in the darkness of evil, moving away from God. Who is the One Good, Life-Giving and Light-giver; for every good thing becomes good by Him; to the extent that it moves away from Him by will, and not by place, to that extent it becomes evil.
Original sin is fatal and more difficult because the commandment of God was easy, clear and definite. The first people could easily fulfill it, for God settled them in paradise, where they enjoyed the beauty of everything visible and ate the life-giving fruits of all trees, except for the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Moreover, they were completely pure and sinless, and nothing from within attracted them to sin; their spiritual powers were fresh, full of the all-powerful Grace of God. If they wanted to, they could, with an insignificant effort, reject the offer of the tempter, establish themselves in goodness and forever remain sinless, holy, immortal, blessed. Also, God's word was clear: they would "die a death" if they ate of the forbidden fruit.
In fact, the original sin in the germ, like a seed, contains all other sins, the entire sinful law in general, its entire essence, its metaphysics, and genealogy, and ontology, and phenomenology. The essence of all sin in general, the beginning of sin, the nature of sin, the alpha and omega of sin, was revealed in original sin. And the essence of sin, whether diabolical or human, is disobedience to God as the Absolute Good and the Creator of all that is good. The cause of this disobedience is selfish pride. “The devil could not have led a person into sin,” says Blessed Augustine, “if self-love had not appeared in this.” “Pride is the pinnacle of evil,” says St. John Chrysostom. - For God, nothing is so disgusting as pride. Therefore, from the very beginning, He arranged everything in such a way in order to destroy this passion in us. Because of pride, we have become mortal, we live in sorrow and sorrow: because of pride, our life passes in torment and tension, burdened with unceasing work. The first man fell into sin from pride, desiring to be equal with God. Original sin is like a ganglion in which all the nerves of all sins converge, and therefore, in the words of Blessed Augustine, it is "unspoken apostasy." “Here is pride, for man desired to be more in his own power than in God's; here is the blasphemy of the sacred, for he did not believe God; here also homicide, for he subjected himself to death; here is spiritual fornication, for the integrity of the soul is violated by the temptation of the serpent; here is theft, for he took advantage of the forbidden fruit; here is the love of wealth, for he desired more than he had enough. In the violation of God's commandment in Paradise, Tertullian sees the violation of all the commandments of God from the Decalogue. “In fact,” says Tertullian, “if Adam and Eve had loved the Lord their God, they would not have acted against His commandment; if they loved their neighbor, i.e. each other, would not believe the temptation of the serpent and would not kill themselves immediately after that, having lost immortality by violating the commandment; they would not commit theft by secretly eating from the fruit of the tree and trying to hide themselves from the face of God; would not become accomplices of the liar - the devil, believing him that they would become like gods, and would not thus offend their Father - God, who created them from the dust of the earth; finally, if they had not coveted someone else's, they would not have eaten from the forbidden fruit. If original sin had not been the mother of all subsequent sins, if it had not been infinitely pernicious and terrible, it would not have caused such pernicious and terrible consequences and would not have prompted the All-Righte Judge - the God of love and philanthropy - to punish our forefathers and their descendants in this way. “The commandment of God was only forbidden to eat from the tree, and therefore the sin looks easy; but how great He who cannot be deceived considers him, is sufficiently evident from the degree of punishment.
Consequences of original sin for the ancestors
The sin of our first parents Adam and Eve is called original because it appeared in the first generation of people and because it was the first sin in the human world. Although it lasted a short time as a process, it caused severe and pernicious consequences for the spiritual and material nature, as well as for all visible nature in general. By their sin, the forefathers introduced the devil into their lives and gave him a place in God-created and God-like nature. Thus sin became creativity in their nature, unnatural and theomachic, malevolent and devil-centered. After a person has transgressed the commandment of God, he, according to St. John of Damascus, was deprived of grace, lost trust in God, covered himself with the severity of a painful life (for this means fig leaves), put on mortality, that is, in mortality and coarseness of the body (for this means putting on skins), according to the righteous judgment of God was expelled from paradise, condemned to death, and made subject to corruption.” “By transgressing the commandment of God, Adam turned away from God with his mind and turned to the creature, from the impassive he became passionate and turned his love from God to the creature and corruption.” In other words, the consequence of the fall of our forefathers was the sinful corruption of their nature and, through this and in this, the mortality of nature.By his willful and self-loving fall into sin, man deprived himself of that direct grace-filled communion with God, which strengthened his soul on the path of god-like perfection. By this, a person himself condemned himself to a double death - bodily and spiritual: bodily, coming when the body is deprived of the soul that revives it, and spiritual, coming when the soul is deprived of the grace of God, which enlivens it with higher spiritual life. “Just as the body then dies when its soul leaves without its power, so the soul then dies when the Holy Spirit leaves it without its power.” The death of the body differs from the death of the soul, for the body disintegrates after death, and when the soul dies from sin, it does not disintegrate, but is deprived of spiritual light, God's striving, joy and bliss and remains in a state of darkness, sorrow and suffering, living unceasingly by itself and from itself. , which many times means - sin and from sin. There is no doubt that sin is the ruin of the soul, a kind of disintegration of the soul, corruption of the soul, for it upsets the soul, perverts, disfigures its God-given life order and makes it impossible to achieve the goal set by God for it and, thus, makes both her and her body mortal . Therefore, St. Gregory the Theologian rightly says: “There is one death - sin; for sin is the ruin of the soul.” Sin, having once entered the soul, infected it, united it with death), as a result of which spiritual mortality is called sinful corruption. As soon as sin, "the sting of death" (1 Corinthians 15:56), plunged into the human soul, it immediately penetrated into it and poured the poison of death over it. And to the extent that the poison of death spread in human nature, to that extent a person moved away from God, Who is life and the Source of any life, and mired in death. “Adam, just as he sinned because of a bad desire, so he died because of sin:“ The patterns of sin, death ”(Rom. 6:23); as far as he moved away from life, he came so close to death, for God is life, and the deprivation of life is death. Therefore, Adam prepared death for himself by moving away from God, according to the word of the Holy Scriptures: “Behold, those who keep themselves away from You will perish” (Ps. 72:27). For our forefathers, spiritual death came immediately after the fall, and bodily death later. “But although Adam and Eve lived for many years after eating the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,” says St. John Chrysostom, - this does not mean that the words of God were not fulfilled: “In that day, if you eat from him, you will die the death” (Gen. 2:17). For from the moment they heard, "Thou art earth, and unto earth thou shalt return" (Gen. 3:19) - they received a death sentence, became mortal and, one might say, died. “In fact,” says St. Gregory Nyssky. - the soul of our ancestors died before the body, for disobedience is not a sin of the body, but of the will, and the will is characteristic of the soul, from which all the devastation of our nature began. Sin is nothing but a separation from God, who is true and who alone is Life. The first man lived for many years after his disobedience, his sin, which does not mean that God lied when he said, "Then you will die of it the next day, you will die the death." For by the very removal of a person from true life, the death sentence against him was confirmed on the same day. The pernicious and devastating change that came after the sin in the entire spiritual life of the forefathers engulfed all the forces of the soul and reflected on them in its atheistic disgust. The sinful damage of the spiritual human nature manifested itself primarily in the clouding of the mind - the eye of the soul. The mind, through the fall, lost its former wisdom, insight, insight, scope and aspiration to God; the very consciousness of the omnipresence of God was darkened in him, which is obvious from the attempt of the fallen forefathers to hide from the All-seeing and Omniscient God (Gen. 3:8) and falsely present their participation in sin (Gen. 3:12-13). “There is nothing worse than sin,” says St. John Chrysostom, “when he comes, he not only fills with shame, but also makes insane those who were reasonable and who were distinguished by great wisdom. Look at what madness the one who until now was distinguished by such wisdom has reached now ... "Hearing the voice of the Lord God, going to paradise at noon," he and his wife hid from the face of the Lord God "in the middle of the tree of paradise." What madness to wish to hide from the Omnipresent God, from the Creator, who created everything out of nothing, who knows the secret, who created human hearts, who knows all their deeds, who searches hearts and wombs, and who knows the very movements of their hearts. Through sin, the mind of our forefathers turned away from the Creator and turned to the creature. From God-centered he became self-centered, gave himself up to sinful thoughts, and egoism (self-love) and pride took possession of him. “By transgressing the commandment of God, a person fell into sinful thoughts, not because God created these thoughts that enslave him, but because the devil sowed them with cunning into rational human nature, which became criminal and rejected by God, so that the devil established a law in human nature. sin, and death reigns through the work of sin. This means that sin acts on the mind, and the latter gives birth and produces from itself thoughts of sin, evil, evil-smelling, corruptible, mortal, and contains human thought in the circle of the mortal, transient, temporal, preventing it from plunging into divine immortality, eternity, immutability.
The will of our forefathers was damaged, weakened and corrupted by sin: it lost its primordial light, love of God and God-directedness, became evil and sin-loving and therefore more prone to evil, and not to good. Immediately after the fall, our forefathers develop and reveal a tendency to lie: Eve puts the blame on the serpent, Adam on Eve, and even on God, Who gave her to him (Gen. 3:12-13). Through the transgression of the commandment of God, sin has poured into the human soul, and the devil has founded for it the law of sin and death, and thus, with its desires, it mostly turns to the circle of the sinful and mortal. “God is Good and Pre-good,” says St. John of Damascus, - such is His will, for what He desires is good: the commandment, teaching this, is the law, so that people, observing it, would be in the light: and breaking the commandment is a sin; sin comes from the prompting, instigation, instigation of the devil and the unforced and voluntary acceptance by man of this devilish suggestion. And sin is also called law.”
Our forefathers polluted and defiled their hearts with their sin: it lost its primeval purity and integrity, the feeling of love for God was replaced by a feeling of fear of God (Gen. 3:8), and the heart gave itself over to unreasonable aspirations and passionate desires. So, our forefathers' eyes were blinded, with which they looked at God, for sin, like a film, fell on the heart, which sees God only when it is pure and holy (Matt. 5:8).
Violation, obscuration, distortion, relaxation, which original sin caused in the spiritual nature of man, can be briefly called violation, damage, obscuration, disfigurement of the image of God in man. For sin darkened, disfigured, disfigured the beautiful image of God in the soul of the primordial man. “Man is created in the image of God and likeness,” says St. Basil the Great, “but sin disfigured the beauty of the image, drawing the soul into passionate desires.” According to the teachings of St. John Chrysostom, as long as Adam did not yet sin, but kept his image, created in the image of God, pure, the animals submitted to him as servants, and when he polluted his image with sin, the animals did not recognize him as their master, and from servants turned into his enemies, and began to fight against him as against a stranger. “When sin entered human life as a habit,” writes St. Gregory of Nyssa, “and from a small beginning, immense evil occurred in a person, and the god-like beauty of the soul, created in the likeness of the Primitive, was covered, like some kind of iron, with the rust of sin, then it could no longer the beauty of the natural image of the soul is more fully preserved, but it has changed into the disgusting image of sin. So man, a great and precious creation, deprived himself of his dignity by falling into the mud (sin), lost the image of the incorruptible God, and through sin put on the image of corruption and dust, like those who through carelessness fell into the mud and smeared their face, so that their and acquaintances cannot recognize. The same father of the Church under the lost drachma of the Gospel (Luke 15:8-10) understands the human soul, that image of the King of Heaven, which is not completely lost, but has fallen into the mud, and by dirt one must understand carnal impurity.
According to the teachings of Holy Scripture and Holy Tradition , the image of God in fallen man was not destroyed, but deeply damaged, darkened and disfigured. Thus, the mind of fallen man, although darkened and disturbed by sin, has not completely lost its desire for God and for God's truth and the ability to receive and understand the revelations of God. This is indicated by the fact that our forefathers, after committing a sin, hide from God, for this testifies to their feeling and consciousness of guilt before God; this is also evidenced by the fact that they immediately recognized God as soon as they heard His voice in paradise; this is evidenced by the whole subsequent life of Adam, right up to his death. The same is true with respect to the will and heart in fallen man: although both the will and the heart were seriously damaged by the fall, nevertheless, in the first man there remained a certain feeling of goodness and a desire for goodness (Rom. 7:18), as well as the ability to the creation of good and the fulfillment of the basic requirements of the moral law (Rom. 2:14-15), for the freedom of choice between good and evil, which distinguishes man from foolish animals, remained even after the fall an inalienable property of human nature. In general, the image of God was not completely destroyed in fallen man, for man was not the only, independent and original creator of his first sin, since he fell not only by the will and action of his will, but also by the action of the devil. “Since man,” the Orthodox confession says about the fall of the forefathers and its consequences for their nature, “being innocent, did not keep the commandment of God in paradise, he deprived himself of his dignity and the state that he had during his innocence .... Then he immediately lost the perfection of reason and knowledge; his will turned more to evil than to good; thus, because of the created evil, his state of innocence and sinlessness was changed into a state of sinfulness. “We believe,” the Eastern Patriarchs declare in their Message, “that the first man created by God fell in paradise when he transgressed the commandment of God, listening to the advice of the serpent...”. Through crime, fallen man became like unreasonable animals, that is, he became darkened and lost his perfection and dispassion, but he did not lose that nature and power that he received from the Most Good God. For he would otherwise become unreasonable, and therefore non-human; but he retained the nature with which he was created, as well as the natural force - free, living, and active, and by nature could choose and do good, and avoid and turn away from evil. Owing to the close and immediate connection of the soul with the body, original sin also caused disorder in the body of our first parents. The consequences of the fall for the body were sickness, pain, and death. God pronounces the following punishment on a wife as the first guilty of sin: “In multiplying, I will multiply your sorrows and your sighs, in pain you will bear children” (Gen. 3:16). “Pronouncing such a punishment,” says St. John Chrysostom, “the philanthropic Lord seems to say to his wife: “I wanted you to lead a life without sorrow and illness, a life free from all sorrow and suffering and full of all pleasure; I wanted you, clothed in a body, not to feel anything carnal. But since you did not use this happiness as you should, but the abundance of blessings brought you to such terrible ingratitude, so that you do not give yourself up to even greater self-will, I throw a bridle on you and condemn you to torment and sighing. To Adam, the accomplice of the fall, God pronounces such a punishment: thorns and thistles will increase you, and tear down the grass of the countryside; in the sweat of your face you shall bring forth your bread, until you return to the earth; The philanthropic Lord punishes man with the curse of the earth. The earth was created for man to enjoy its fruits, but God, after a man has sinned, curses her so that this curse would deprive a person of peace, tranquility and prosperity, creating sorrow and torment for him when cultivating the land. All these torments and sorrows are piled on a person so that he does not think too highly about his dignity and that they constantly remind him of his nature and protect him from more serious sins.
“From sin, as from a source, illnesses, sorrows, sufferings poured out on a person,” says St. Theophilus. Through the Fall, the body lost its original health, innocence, and immortality and became sickly, vicious, and mortal. Before sin, it was in perfect harmony with the soul; this harmony was broken after sin, and the war of the body with the soul began. As an inevitable consequence of original sin, infirmities and corruption appeared, because God removed the first parents from the tree of life, by the fruits of which they could maintain the immortality of their body (Gen. 3:22), which means immortality with all diseases, sorrows and sufferings. The philanthropic Lord expelled our forefathers from paradise so that, eating the fruits from the tree of life, they would not remain immortal in sins and sorrows. This does not mean that God was the cause of the death of our forefathers - they themselves were such by their sin, since by disobedience they fell away from the Living and Life-Giving God and indulged in sin, exuding the poison of death and infecting with death everything that he touches. Mortality is “transferred by sin to the nature created for immortality; it covers his exterior, not his interior, it covers the material part of a person, but does not touch the very image of God.
By sin, our forefathers violated their God-given attitude towards visible nature: they were expelled from their blessed abode - paradise (Gen. 3: 23-24): they largely lost power over nature, over animals, and the earth became cursed for man: “Thorns and thistles increase for you” (Gen. 3:18). Created for man, led by man as his mysterious body, blessed for the sake of man, the earth with all creatures became cursed because of man and subject to corruption and destruction, as a result of which “the whole creation ... groans and is in pain” (Rom. 8:22).
Inheritance of original sin
1. Since all people are descended from Adam, then the original sin passed by heredity and was transferred to all people. Therefore, original sin is at the same time hereditary sin. Taking human nature from Adam, we all accept sinful corruption with him, which is why people are born “children of wrath by nature” (Eph. 2.3), for the righteous wrath of God rests on Adam’s sin-infected nature. But original sin is not entirely identical in Adam and his descendants. Adam consciously, personally, directly and willfully transgressed the commandment of God, i.e. created sin, which produced in him a sinful state in which the beginning of sinfulness reigns. In other words, two points must be distinguished in Adam's original sin: the first is the act itself, the act of violating God's commandment, the crime itself (/Greek/ "paravasis" (Rom. 5:14), the sin itself (/Greek/ "paraptoma "(Rom.5:12)); disobedience itself (/Greek/ "parakoi" (Rom.5:19); and the second - the sinful state created by this, o-sinfulness ("amartia" (Rom.5:12, 14)).The descendants of Adam, in the strict sense of the word, did not personally, directly, consciously and willfully participate in the very act of Adam, in the crime itself (in the “paraptom”, in the “parakoia”, in the “paravasis”), but, being born from fallen Adam, from his sin-infected nature, they at birth accept as an inevitable inheritance the sinful state of nature in which sin (/Greek/ “amartia”) lives, which, as a kind of living principle, acts and attracts to the creation of personal sins similar to the sin of Adam Therefore, they are punished, just like Adam.The inevitable consequence of sin, the soul of sin - death - reigns from Adam, as St. Apostle Paul, “and over those who did not sin in the likeness of Adam’s crime” (Rom. 5:12, 14), i.e., according to the teaching of the blessed Theodoret, and over those who did not sin directly, like Adam, and did not eat from the forbidden fruit , but they sinned like the crime of Adam and became participants in his fall as a forefather. “Since all people were in Adam in a state of innocence,” the Orthodox confession says, “then as soon as Adam sinned, everyone sinned with him and entered into a sinful state, being subjected not only to sin, but also to the punishment for sin.” In fact, every personal sin of each descendant of Adam draws its essential, sinful power from the sin of the forefathers, and the heredity of original sin is nothing more than a continuation of the fallen state of the forefathers in the descendants of Adam. 2. The heredity of original sin is universal, for none of the people is excluded from this, except for the God-man the Lord Jesus Christ, born in a higher natural way from the Holy Virgin and the Holy Spirit. The universal heredity of original sin is confirmed in many and various ways by the Holy Revelation of the Old and New Testaments. Thus, it teaches that fallen, sin-infected Adam gave birth to children “in his own image” (Gen. 5:3), i.e. according to his disfigured, damaged, sin-corrupted image. Righteous Job points to the ancestral sin as the source of universal human sinfulness when he says: “Who will be pure from filth? No one, except for one day, his life on earth ”(Job. 14: 4-5; cf.: Job. 15: 14; Is. 63: 6: Sir. 17: 30; Prem. 12: 10; Sir. 41 :8). The prophet David, although he was born of pious parents, complains: “Behold, in iniquity (in the original Hebrew - “in iniquity”) I was conceived, and in sins (in the Hebrew - “in sin”) give birth to me, my mother” (Ps. 50:7), which indicates the infection of human nature in general with sin and its transmission through conception and birth. All people, as descendants of the fallen Adam, are subject to sin, therefore the Holy Revelation says: “There is no man who will not sin” (1 Kings 8:46; 2 Chronicles 6:36); “There is no righteous man on earth who does good and does not sin” (Eccl. 7:20); “Who boasts of having a pure heart? or who dares to say that he is clean for himself from sins? (Prov. 20:9; cf. Sir. 7:5). No matter how much they look for a sinless person - a person who would not be infected with sinfulness and subject to sin - the Old Testament Revelation states that there is no such person: do not do good, do not do good, not to one ”(Ps.52:4: cf.: Ps.13:3, 129:3, 142:2: Job.9:2, 4:17, 25:4; Gen.6: 5:21); “Every man is a lie” (Ps. 115:2) - in the sense that in each descendant of Adam, through the infection with sin, the father of sin and lies acts - the devil, who lies against God and the God-created creature. The New Testament Revelation is based on the truth: all people are sinners, all except the Lord Jesus Christ. Descended from Adam, corrupted by sin, as the only ancestor (Acts 17:26), all people are under sin, "all have sinned and come short of the glory of God" (Rom. 3:9, 23; cf.: Rom. 7:14), all by their sin-infected nature are “children of wrath” (Eph. 2:3). Therefore, whoever has, knows and feels the New Testament truth about the sinfulness of all people without exception, he cannot say that any of the people is without sin: 1 Jn. 1:8; cf. John 8:7, 9). Only the Lord Jesus Christ is without sin as the God-Man, for He was born not by natural, seed, sinful conception, but by seedless conception from the Holy Virgin and the Holy Spirit. Living in a world that “lies in evil” (1 John 5:19), the Lord Jesus “does not commit sin, nor find deceit in His mouth” (1 Pet. 2:22; cf.: 2 Cor. 5:21), for “There is no sin in Him” (1 John 3:5; cf. Is. 53:9). Being the only sinless one among all people of all times, the Savior could, dared and had the right of His devilishly crafty enemies, who constantly followed Him, to accuse Him of sin, fearlessly and openly ask: “Who from you convicts Me about sin?” (John 8:46).In His conversation with Nicodemus, the sinless Savior declares that in order to enter the Kingdom of God, every person needs to be reborn by water and the Holy Spirit, since every person is born with original sin, for “that which is born of the flesh is flesh” (John 3:6). Here the word “flesh” (/Greek/ “sarks”) denotes that sinful nature of Adam, with which each person is born into the world, which penetrates the whole human being and is especially manifested in his carnal moods (dispositions), aspirations and actions ((cf. .: Romans 7:5-6, 14-25, 8:1-16; Gal. 3:3, 5:16-25; 1 Peter 2:11, etc.)). Because of this sinfulness, operating in personal sins and through the personal sins of each person, each person is a “slave of sin” (John 8:34; cf. Rom. 6:16; 2 Pet. 2:19). Since Adam is the father of all people, he is also the creator of the universal sinfulness of all people, and through this, the universal infection with death). The slaves of sin are at the same time slaves of death: by inheriting sinfulness from Adam, they thereby inherit mortality. The God-bearing Apostle writes: “Therefore, as by one man (i.e. Adam (Rom. 5:14) sin entered the world, (in it) all sinned” (Rom. 5:12). This means: Adam is the founder of mankind and as such he is the ancestor of universal human sinfulness, from him and through him entered into all his descendants "amartya" - the sinfulness of nature, the inclination to sin, which, like a sinful principle, lives in every person (Rom. 7:20), acts but if our birth from sinful forefathers were the only cause of our sinfulness and mortality, then this would be inconsistent with the justice of God, which cannot allow all people to be sinful and mortal only because that their forefather sinned and became mortal without their personal participation in this and consent to it.But we manifest ourselves as descendants of Adam because the Omniscient God foresaw: the will of each of us will be similar to the will of Adam, and each of us will sin, like Adam I confirm this and the words of the Christ-bearing Apostle: since everyone has sinned, therefore, according to the words of the blessed Theodoret, each of us is subject to death not because of the sin of the forefather, but because of our own sin. And St. Justin says: “The human race from Adam came under the power of death and the deception of the serpent, for the reason that every person did evil.” In accordance with this, the heredity of death, which originated from the sin of Adam, extends to all the descendants of Adam also because of their personal sins, which God foresaw from eternity in His omniscience.
The holy Apostle points out the genetic and causal dependence of the universal sinfulness of Adam's descendants on Adam's sin when he draws a parallel between Adam and the Lord Jesus Christ. As the Lord Jesus Christ is the Source of truth, justification, life and resurrection, so Adam is the source of sin, condemnation and death: outside the justification of life. For by the disobedience of the one man, many were sinners, and the obedience of the one righteous man will be many” (Rom. 5:18-19). “For a man is death, and a man is the Resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Corinthians 15:21-22).
The sinfulness of human nature, originating from Adam, manifests itself in all people without exception as a kind of living sinful principle, as a kind of living sinful force, as a certain category of sin, as a law of sin that lives in a person and acts in him and through him (Rom. 7: 14-23). But man participates in this by his free will, and this sinfulness of nature branches out and grows through his personal sins. The law of sin, lurking in human nature, fights against the law of reason and makes a person his slave, and a person does not do the good that he wants, but does the evil that he does not want, doing so because of the sin that lives in him. “In human nature there is a stench and a feeling of sin,” says St. John of Damascus, “that is, lust and sensual pleasure, called the law of sin; and conscience is the law of human reason. The law of sin fights against the law of reason, but it is not able to completely destroy all goodness in a person and make him incapable of living in goodness and for the sake of goodness. With the God-like essence of his soul, although disfigured by sin, a person tries to serve the law of his mind, i.e. conscience, and according to an inward, God-seeking person, he Feels joy in the law of God (Rom. 7:22). And when he makes the Lord Jesus Christ the life of his life by the grace-filled feat of working faith, then he easily and joyfully serves the law of God (Rom. 7:25). But even the pagans who live outside of the Holy Revelation, in addition to all subjection to sin, always have in themselves the desire for goodness as an inalienable and inviolable property of their nature and can cognize the Living and True God with their god-like soul and do what is in accordance with the law of God, written in the hearts. them (Rom. 7:18-19, 1:19-20, 2:14-15).
3. The divinely revealed teaching of the Holy Scriptures about the reality and universal heredity of original sin has been elaborated, explained and witnessed by the Church in Holy Tradition. Ever since apostolic times, there has been a sacred custom of the Church to baptize children for the remission of sins, as evidenced by the decisions of the Councils and the holy fathers. On this occasion, the wise Origen wrote: “If children are baptized for the remission of sins, the question is - what are these sins? When did they sin? For what else do they need a baptismal font, if not for the sake of the fact that no one can be clean from dirt, even if he lived one day on earth? Children, therefore, are baptized, because by the sacrament of baptism they are cleansed from the impurity of birth. Regarding the baptism of children for the remission of sins, the fathers of the Carthaginian Council (418) in the 124th canon say: “Whoever rejects the need for baptism of small and newborn children from the mother’s womb of children or says that although they are baptized for the remission of sins, but from the ancestral Adam sin, they do not borrow anything that should be washed by the bath of re-existence (from which it would follow that the image of baptism for the remission of sins is used over them not in a true, but in a false sense), let him be anathema. For what was said by the Apostle: “By one man, sin is in the world, and death is in sin: and such is death in all men, in whom all have sinned” (Rom. , spilled and spread everywhere. For according to this rule of faith, even infants, who are not able to commit any sins by themselves, are truly baptized for the remission of sins, so that through regeneration, that which they took from the old birth will be cleansed in them. In the struggle with Pelagius, who denied the reality and heredity of original sin, the Church at more than twenty councils condemned this teaching of Pelagius and thereby showed that the truth of the Holy Revelation about the universal heredity of original sin is deeply rooted in her holy, catholic, universal feeling and consciousness. In all the Fathers and Teachers of the Church, who dealt with the question of the general sinfulness of people, we find a clear and definite teaching about hereditary sinfulness, which they make dependent on the original sin of Adam. “We all sinned in the first man,” writes St. Ambrose, “and through the inheritance of nature, an inheritance spread from one to all and in sin ... Adam, therefore, in each of us: human nature sinned in him, for through one sin passed for everyone". “It is impossible,” says St. Gregory of Nyssa, “to embrace the multitude of those in whom evil has spread through inheritance; the pernicious wealth of vice, shared by each of them, increased by each, and thus the fertile evil passed (transmitted) in an uninterrupted chain of generations, spilling over many people to infinity, until, having reached the final border, it took possession of all human nature, as about The prophet clearly said this about everyone in general: “All deviating, together they were not key (Ps. 13:3), and there was nothing in existence that was not an instrument of evil. Since all people are heirs of Adam's nature corrupted by sin, then all are conceived and born in sin, for according to the natural law, what is born is identical with the one who gives birth; from the damaged by the passions, the passionate is born; from the sinner, the sinner. Infected with ancestral sinfulness, the human soul gave itself more and more to evil, multiplied sins, invented vices, created false gods for itself, and people, not knowing satiety in evil deeds, drowned more and more in depravity and spread the stench of their sins, showing to those that they have become insatiable in transgressions. “By the error of one Adam, the whole human race was misled; Adam transferred to all people his condemnation to death and the miserable state of his nature: all are under the law of sin, all are spiritual slaves; sin is the father of our body, unbelief is the mother of our soul.” “From the moment of the violation of the commandment of God, Satan and his angels sat down in the heart and in the human body, as if on their own throne.” “By breaking the commandment of God in Paradise, Adam committed original sin and transferred his sin to everyone.” “By Adam's transgression, sin fell into all people; and people, having settled their thoughts on evil, became mortal, and corruption and corruption took possession of them. All descendants of Adam acquire original sin by heredity through birth from Adam through the body. “There is a certain hidden impurity and a certain overwhelming darkness of passion, which, through the transgression of Adam, has penetrated all mankind; and it darkens and defiles both the body and the soul.” Since humans have inherited Adam's sinfulness, a "muddy stream of sin" flows from their hearts. “From Adam’s transgression, darkness fell on all creation and on all human nature, and therefore people, covered with this darkness, spend their lives in the night, in terrible places.” “Adam, by his fall, took a terrible stench into his soul and was filled with blackness and darkness. With what Adam suffered, so did all of us, descended from the seed of Adam: we are all the sons of this darkened ancestor, we are all partakers of this very malice. “Just as Adam, having transgressed the commandment of God, received the leaven of evil passions, so the whole human race, being born from Adam, through participation became a community of this leaven; and by the gradual growth in people, sinful passions have multiplied so much that all mankind has become sour with evil. The universal heredity of original sin, which manifests itself in the universal sinfulness of people, was not invented by man; on the contrary, it constitutes the God-revealed dogmatic truth of the Christian faith. “I didn’t invent original sin,” Blessed Augustine wrote against the Pelagians, “in which the Universal Church believes from the beginning, but you, who reject this dogma, are without a doubt a new heretic.” The baptism of children, in which the recipient on behalf of the children is denied by Satan, testifies that the children are under original sin, for they are born with a nature corrupted by sin, in which Satan operates. “And the very sufferings of children happen not because of their personal sins, but are a manifestation of the punishment that the Righteous God pronounced over human nature that fell in Adam.” "In Adam, human nature is corrupted by sin, put to death and righteously condemned, therefore all people are born from Adam in the same state." Sinful depravity from Adam passes into all his descendants through conception and birth, therefore everyone is subject to this primordial sinfulness, but it does not destroy in people their freedom to desire and do good and the ability to grace rebirth. “All people were in Adam not only when he was in paradise, but were with him and in him when he was expelled from paradise for sin, therefore they bear all the consequences of Adam’s sin.”
The very method of transferring original sin from ancestors to descendants is enclosed, in its essence, in an impenetrable mystery. “There is nothing more famous than the teaching of the Church on original sin,” says Blessed Augustine, “but nothing is more mysterious to understand.” According to church teaching, one thing is certain: hereditary sinfulness from Adam is transmitted to all people through conception and birth. On this issue, the decision of the Council of Carthage (252), in which 66 bishops took part under the chairmanship of St. Cyprian, is very important. Considering that the baptism of children should not be delayed until the eighth day (following the example of circumcision in Old Testament Church on the eighth day), but baptize them even before that. The Council justified its decision in the following way: “Since even the greatest sinners who have sinned against God are granted remission of sins when they believe, and no one is denied forgiveness and grace, this child who has just been born should not be forbidden, nor in than it did not sin, but itself, having originated in the body from Adam, received the infection of the ancient death through the very birth, and which can so much easier begin to accept the remission of sins, since it is not his own, but other people's sins that are forgiven him.
4. With the transfer of ancestral sinfulness to all the descendants of Adam by birth, all the consequences that befell our first parents after the fall are transferred to all of them at the same time; disfigurement of the image of God, clouding of the mind, corruption of the will, defilement of the heart, sickness, suffering and death. All people, being the descendants of Adam, inherit from Adam the godlikeness of the soul, but the godlikeness darkened and disfigured by sinfulness. The whole human soul is generally saturated with ancestral sinfulness. “Cunning prince of darkness,” says Saint Macarius the Great. - even at the beginning he enslaved a person and clothed his whole soul with sin, defiled her whole being and all of her, enslaved her all, did not leave in her any part of her free from his power, neither thoughts, nor mind, nor body. The whole soul suffered from the passion of vice and sin, for the evil one clothed the whole soul in his evil, that is, in sin. Feeling the feeble floundering of each person individually and of all people together in the abyss of sinfulness, the Orthodox prays with a sob: “Walking in the abyss of sin, calling upon the abyss beyond traces of Your mercy: from aphids, O God, raise me up.” But although the image of God, which is the integrity of the soul, is mutilated and darkened in people, it is still not destroyed in them, because with its destruction that which makes a person a man would be destroyed, which means that a person would be destroyed as such. The image of God continues to be the main treasure in people (Gen. 9:6) and partially manifests its main features (Gen. 9: 1-2), the Lord Jesus Christ did not come into the world in order to re-create the image of God in fallen man , and in order to renew it - “Yes, His packs will renew the image, decayed by passions”; May it renew “our nature corrupted by sins.” And in sins, a person nevertheless reveals the image of God (1 Cor. 11: 7): “I am the inexpressible image of Your glory, if I also bear the plague of sins.” The New Testament economy of salvation just provides the fallen man with all the means so that with the help of grace-filled ascetics he transforms himself, renews the image of God in himself (2 Cor. 3:18) and becomes Christlike (Rom. 8:29; Col. 3:10) .
With the disfigurement and darkening of the human soul as a single whole, the human mind was disfigured and darkened in all the descendants of Adam. This obscuration of the mind is manifested in its slowness, blindness and inability to accept, assimilate and comprehend spiritual things, so that “we can hardly comprehend what is on earth, and we hardly understand what is under our hands, and what is in heaven - who explored ? (Wisdom 9:16). O-sinful, bodily man does not accept what is from the Spirit of God, for it seems to him foolishness, and he cannot understand it (1 Corinthians 2:14). Hence the ignorance True God and spiritual values, hence - delusions, prejudices, unbelief, superstition, paganism), polytheism, godlessness. But this bewilderment of the mind, this madness with sin, this delusion in sin cannot be represented as the complete annihilation of a person's mental ability to comprehend spiritual things; The apostle teaches that the human mind, although it is in the darkness and darkness of original sin, still has the ability to partially know God and accept His revelations (Rom. 1:19-20).
As a consequence of original sin, corruption appears in the descendants of Adam, the weakness of the will and its greater inclination to evil than to good. Sin-centric self-love became the main lever of their activity. It bound their god-like freedom and made them slaves of sin (John 8:34; Rom. 5:21; Rom. 6:12; Rom. 6:17; Rom. 6:20). But no matter how sin-centric the will of the descendants of Adam may be, the inclination towards goodness has not been completely destroyed in it: a person is aware of goodness, desires it, and the will corrupted by sin attracts to evil and does evil: “The good that I want, I do not do, but the evil that I do not want, I do” (Rom. 7:19); "an unrestrained desire for evil attracts me, by the action of the enemy, and by the evil custom." This sinful striving for evil through habit has become in the historical process a kind of law. human activity: “I have found the law, that I desire to do good, for evil is present with me” (Rom. 7:21). But besides all this, the god-like soul of the sin-infected descendants of Adam breaks out with the God-directed element of his will towards God's good, "delights with the law of God" (Rom. to do good has remained with people, weakened by the inheritance of original sin and their personal sinfulness, so that, according to the Apostle, the pagans “work with a lawful nature” (Rom. 2:14). People are by no means a blind instrument of sin, evil, the devil; free will always lives in them, which, despite all the infection with sin, nevertheless acts freely, can both wish good and do it.
Impurity, wickedness. defilement of the heart is the common lot of all the descendants of Adam. It manifests itself as insensitivity to spiritual things and as immersion in unreasonable aspirations and passionate desires. The human heart, lulled by the love of sin, awakens heavily to the eternal reality of the holy truths of God: “The sleep of sin burdens the heart.” The heart infected with primordial sinfulness is a workshop of evil thoughts, evil desires, evil feelings, evil deeds. The Savior teaches: “For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, debts, false witness, blasphemy” (Matt. 15:19 cf. Mark 7:21; Gen. 6:5; Proverbs 6:14) . But “deep is the heart more than all” (Jer. 17:9), so that even in a sinful state it retained the power to “delight with the law of God” (Rom. 7:22). In a sinful state, the heart is like a mirror smeared with black mud, which shines with Divine purity and beauty as soon as the sinful mud is cleaned from it: then God can be reflected in it and be visible ((cf. Matt. 5:8)).
Death is the destiny of all the descendants of Adam, for they are born from Adam, infected with sin and therefore mortal. Just as an infected stream naturally flows from an infected source, so from an ancestor infected with sin and death naturally flows offspring infected with sin and death ((cf. Rom. 5:12: 1 Cor. 15:22)). Both the death of Adam and the death of his descendants is twofold: bodily and spiritual. Bodily death is when the body is deprived of the soul that revives it, and spiritual death is when the soul is deprived of the grace of God, which revives it with a higher, spiritual, God-oriented life, and according to the holy prophet, “the soul that sins, it will die” (Ezek. 18:20: cf. Ezek. 18:4).
Death has its forerunners - illness and suffering. The body, weakened by hereditary and personal sinfulness, became perishable, and "death by perishability reigns over all people." The sin-loving body indulged in sinfulness, which manifests itself in the unnatural predominance of the body over the soul, as a result of which the body often represents a kind of great burden for the soul and an obstacle to its God-directed activity. “A perishable body suppresses a thoughtful mind” (Wisdom 9:15). As a consequence of Adam's sinfulness, a pernicious schism and strife appeared in his descendants, a struggle and enmity between the soul and the body: "For the flesh lusts for the spirit, and the spirit for the flesh; .5:17).
Erroneous doctrines of original sin
Even in the first centuries of Christianity, the Ebionites, Gnostics and Manichaeans denied the dogma of original sin and its consequences. According to their teaching, man never morally fell and did not violate the commandments of God, since the fall was carried out long before the appearance of man in the world. Due to the influence of the evil principle that reigns in the world against the will and without the will of man, a person is only subjected to sin, which already existed, and this influence is irresistible.The Ophites (from the Greek “ophit” - snake) taught that a person, strengthened by the advice of wisdom, which appeared in the form of a snake (“ophiomorphos”), transgressed the commandment and thus reached the knowledge of the true God.
The Encratites and Manichaeans taught that by His commandment God forbade Adam and Eve to marry, marital relations; the sin of the forefathers was that they violated this commandment of God. The groundlessness and falsity of this teaching is obvious, for the Bible clearly says that God, as soon as He created the first people, blessed them and said to them: “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth” (Gen. 1:28) and immediately gave them the law of marriage (Gen. 2:24). All this, therefore, happened before the serpent tempted the first people and led them into sin.
Clement of Alexandria erroneously taught and believed that the sin of the first people consisted in the violation of the commandment, which forbade them from untimely marriage.
Origen, according to his theory of the pre-existence of souls, understood both the fall and the sin of the first people as the fall of their souls into spiritual world before the emergence visible world, as a result of which God drove them from heaven to earth and instilled them into bodies, which is allegedly indicated by the very image of Adam's expulsion from paradise and his dressing in leather clothes.
In the 5th century, the British monk Pelagius and his adherents - the Pelagians - put forward their theory of the origin and heredity of sin, which is in everything contrary to the revealed teaching. In short, it is as follows: sin is not something substantial and does not belong to human nature; sin is a completely accidental instantaneous phenomenon that occurs only in the field of free will, and then only insofar as freedom has developed in it, which alone can produce it. What is sin anyway? Is it something that can be avoided or something that cannot be avoided? What cannot be avoided is not a sin; sin is something that can be avoided, and, accordingly, a person can be without sin, since sin depends solely on the human will. Sin is not some permanent and unchanging state or sinful disposition; it is only an accidental or momentary illegal act of will, leaving its mark only in the memory and conscience of the sinner. Hence Adam's first sin could not even in the very spiritual or bodily nature of Adam produce any essential damage; still less could he do it in his descendants, who could not inherit from their forefather what he did not have in his nature. To recognize the existence of hereditary sin would be to recognize sin by nature, i.e. recognize the existence of an evil, vicious nature, and this would lead to Manichaeism. The sin of Adam could not be passed on to his descendants also because it would be contrary to the truth (justice) to transfer the responsibility for the sin of one person to people who did not participate in the creation of sin. Besides, if Adam could transfer his sin to his descendants, why then does not the righteous transfer his righteousness to his descendants, or why not other sins were transferred in the same way? There is, therefore, no hereditary sin, sin ex traduce. For if there were original sin, hereditary sin, it would have to have its cause; meanwhile, this cause could not be in the will of the child, since it is still undeveloped, but in the will of God, and thus this sin, in reality, would be the sin of God, and not the sin of the child. Recognizing original sin means recognizing sin by nature, that is, recognizing the existence of a bad, evil nature, and this is the Manichaean teaching. In fact, all people are born exactly the same innocent and sinless as their first parents were before the fall. In this state of innocence and purity they remain until such time as conscience and freedom develop in them; sin is possible only in the presence of a developed conscience and freedom, for it is in fact an act of free will. People sin out of their own conscious freedom, and in part by looking at the example of Adam. The freedom of man is so strong that a man could, if only he firmly and sincerely decide, remain forever sinless and not commit a single sin. "Before and after Christ there were philosophers and biblical righteous who never sinned." Death is not a consequence of Adam's sin, but a necessary portion of the created nature. Adam was created mortal; whether he sinned or not, he had to die.
Blessed Augustine especially fought against the Pelagian heresy, powerfully defending the ancient teaching of the Church on original sin, but at the same time he himself fell into the opposite extreme. He argued that original sin destroyed the primitive nature of man to such an extent that a person corrupted by sin cannot only do good, but also desire it, desire it. He is the slave of sin, in which there is no desire and creation of good.
Review and criticism of Roman Catholic and Protestant teachings
1. Roman Catholics teach that original sin took away Adam's original righteousness, grace-filled perfection, but did not damage his very nature. And the original righteousness, according to their teaching, was not organic integral part spiritual and moral nature of man, but the external gift of grace, a special addition to the natural forces of man. Hence the sin of the first man, consisting in the rejection of this purely external, supernatural grace, the turning away of man from God, is nothing more than the deprivation of man of this grace, the deprivation of man of primitive righteousness and the return of man to a purely natural state, a state without grace. The very nature of man remained after the fall as it was before the fall. Before sin, Adam was like a royal courtier, whose external glory was taken away because of a crime, and he returned to his original state, in which he had previously been. The rulings of the Council of Trent on original sin state that the sin of the forefathers consisted in the loss of the holiness and righteousness bestowed upon them, but it does not specify exactly what kind of holiness and righteousness were. It states that there is absolutely no trace of sin or anything that would be displeasing to God in a regenerate person. There remains only lust, which, due to its motivation of man to fight, is more useful than harmful for people. In any case, it is not sin, although it itself is from sin and leads to sin. The fifth decree says: “The Holy Council confesses and knows that lust remains with the baptized; but she, as left to fight, cannot harm those who do not agree with her, and those who courageously fight by the grace of Jesus Christ, but, on the contrary, he who will struggle gloriously is crowned. The Holy Council declares that this lust, which the Apostle sometimes calls sin, has never been called sin by the Universal Church in the sense that it is true and proper sin among the reborn, but that it is from sin and leads to sin.This Roman Catholic teaching is groundless, since it represents the original righteousness and perfection of Adam as an external gift, as an advantage added to nature from without and separable from nature. Meanwhile, it is clear from the ancient apostolic-church teaching that this primitive righteousness of Adam was not an external gift and advantage, but an integral part of his God-created nature. Holy Scripture affirms that sin so deeply shook and upset human nature that a person is weak for good and when he wants, he cannot do good (Rom. 7: 18-19), and he cannot do it precisely because sin has a strong influence on human nature. In addition, if sin had not damaged human nature so much, there would be no need for the Only Begotten Son of God to incarnate, come into the world as a Savior and demand from us a complete bodily and spiritual rebirth (John 3:3, 3:5 -6). Moreover, Roman Catholics cannot give a correct answer to the question: how can an intact nature carry lust in itself? What is the relation of this lust to a healthy nature?
In the same way, the Roman Catholic assertion that there is nothing sinful and objectionable to God left in the regenerate person, and that all this gives way to that which is immaculate, holy and pleasing to God. For from the Holy Revelation and the teachings of the ancient Church, we know that the grace taught to fallen man through Jesus Christ does not act mechanically, does not give sanctification and salvation immediately, in the twinkling of an eye, but gradually penetrates all the psychophysical forces of a person, in proportion to his personal feat in the new life, and thus simultaneously heals him from all sinful ailments, and sanctifies him in all thoughts, feelings, desires and deeds. It is an unreasonable exaggeration to think and assert that the reborn have absolutely no remnants of sinful ailments, when the seer beloved by Christ clearly teaches: “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8 ); and the great Apostle of the Nations writes: “The good that I want I do not, but the evil that I do not want I do. But if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me” (Rom. 7:19-20; cf. Rom. 8:23-24).
2. The counterbalance to the Roman Catholic doctrine of original sin is the Protestant doctrine. In accordance with it, sin has completely destroyed freedom in man, the image of God and all spiritual forces, and human nature itself has become sin, and man is absolutely incapable of any good; all that he desires and does is sin: and his very virtues are sins; man is a spiritual dead man, a statue without eyes, mind and feelings; sin destroyed in him the nature created by God and, instead of the image of God, put in him the image of the devil. Hereditary sin has so entered human nature, so permeated it, that no power in this world can separate it from a person, moreover, neither baptism itself destroys this sin, but only blots out guilt; only in resurrection of the dead this sin will be completely taken from the person. But although a person, due to complete slavery to original sin, does not have the power in himself to do good, which would be manifested in works of righteousness, spiritual righteousness, or in divine works related to the salvation of the soul, there is still a spiritual power in him, acting in the area civil righteousness, i.e. a fallen person can, for example, speak about God, express by external actions a certain obedience to God, can obey the authorities and parents when choosing these external actions: to hold back the hand from murder, adultery, theft, etc. If this Protestant teaching is considered in the light of the above-stated Divinely revealed teaching of the Church about original sin and its consequences, its groundlessness becomes obvious. This groundlessness is especially evident in the fact that the Protestant teaching completely identifies the primitive righteousness of Adam with his very nature and makes no distinction between them. Therefore, when a man sinned, not only original righteousness was taken from him, but all nature; the loss of primitive righteousness is identical with the loss, the destruction of nature (nature). Holy Scripture in no sense recognizes either the complete annihilation of nature by the sin of Adam, or the fact that in the place of the former nature created by God, a new nature could appear in the image of Satan. If this latter were true, then there would be no desire for goodness left in man, no inclination to goodness, no power to do good. Holy Scripture, however, states that even in fallen man there are remnants of goodness, inclinations towards goodness, a desire for goodness and the ability to do good (Rom. 7:18; Ex. 1:17; Is. Joshua 6:26; Mt. 5 :46, 7:9, 19:17; Acts 28:2; Rom. 2:14-15). The Savior just appealed to the human goodness left in the sin-infected nature. These remnants of goodness themselves could not exist if Adam, after committing sin, acquired the image of Satan instead of the image of God.
The Protestant sects of Arminian and Socinian represent in this respect a renewal of the Pelagian doctrine, since they reject any cause and genetic connection between the original sin of our first parents and the sins of his descendants. Adam's sin not only could not have any detrimental power to Adam's descendants, but it did not harm Adam himself. They recognize death as the only consequence of Adam's sin, but death is not a punishment, but a physical evil endured by birth.
In this regard, the Orthodox Church today, as always, relentlessly confesses the Divinely revealed teaching of Holy Scripture and Holy Tradition. The Epistle of the Eastern Patriarchs says: “We believe that the first man created by God fell in paradise when he violated the commandment of God, listening to the advice of the serpent, and that from there the sin of the ancestor spreads to all offspring by way of inheritance, so that there is no one born according to the flesh who would be free from this burden and would not feel the consequences of the fall in this life. The burden and consequences of the fall are not what we call sin itself (such as: godlessness, blasphemy, murder, hatred, and everything else that comes from evil heart human), but a strong inclination to sin... A man who fell through crime became like unreasonable animals, that is, he became darkened and lost his perfection and dispassion, but he did not lose that nature and power that he received from the All-Good God. For otherwise he would become unreasonable, and therefore not a man; but he retained the nature with which he was created, and the natural power - free, living and active, so that by nature he can choose and do good, avoid evil and turn away from it. And the fact that a person can by nature do good, the Lord pointed out to this when He said that even the Gentiles love those who love them, and the Apostle Paul teaches very clearly in the epistle to the Romans (Rom. 1:19) and in another place where says that "Gentiles, having no law, work with a lawful nature" (Rom. 2:14). Therefore, it is obvious that the good that a person does cannot be sin, for good cannot be evil. Being natural, it makes a person only bodily, and not spiritual... But among those reborn by grace, it, aided by grace, becomes perfect and makes a person worthy of salvation.” And the Orthodox Confession says: “Since all people were in Adam in a state of innocence, as soon as he sinned, they all sinned with him and entered into a state of sin, being subjected not only to sin, but also to the punishment for sin ... Therefore, with this we are conceived in sin in the womb, and are born, as the Psalmist says about this: “Behold, I was conceived in lawless people, and in sins my mother gave birth to me” (Ps. 50: 7). Hence, in everyone, because of sin, the mind and will are damaged. However, although the human will is damaged by original sin, nevertheless (according to the thought of St. Basil the Great) even now it is a matter of the will of everyone to be good and a child of God or evil and the son of the devil.
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Adam and Eve- the first people created by God, people on earth.
The name Adam means man, son of the earth. The name Adam is often identified with the word man. The expression "sons of Adam" means "sons of men." The name Eve is the giver of life. Adam and Eve are the progenitors of the human race.
A description of the life of Adam and Eve can be read in the first book of the Bible - - in chapters 2 - 4 (audio recordings are also available on the pages).
Creation of Adam and Eve.
Alexander Sulimov. Adam and EveAdam and Eve were created by God in His likeness on the sixth day of creation. Adam was created "from the dust of the ground." God gave him a soul. According to the Hebrew calendar, Adam was created in 3760 BC. e.
God settled Adam in the Garden of Eden and allowed him to eat fruit from any tree except the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Adam was to cultivate and keep the Garden of Eden, and also to give names to all the animals and birds created by God. Eve was created as Adam's helper.
The creation of Eve from Adam's rib emphasizes the idea of the dual unity of man. The text of Genesis emphasizes that "it is not good for the man to be alone." The creation of a wife is one of the main plans of God - ensuring the life of a person in love, for "God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him."
The first man is the crown of the world created by God. He has royal dignity and is the ruler of the newly created world.
Where was the Garden of Eden located?
We have become accustomed to the appearance of sensational reports that the place where the Garden of Eden was located has been found. Of course, the location of each "discovery" is different from the previous one. The Bible describes the area around the garden, and even uses recognizable place names such as Ethiopia and the name of four rivers, including the Tigris and Euphrates. This has led many, including Bible scholars, to conclude that the Garden of Eden was located somewhere in the Middle East region known today as the Tigris and Euphrates Valley.
To date, there are several versions of the location of the Garden of Eden, none of which has solid evidence.
Temptation.
It is not known how long Adam and Eve lived in the Garden of Eden (according to the Book of Jubilees, Adam and Eve lived in the Garden of Eden for 7 years) and were in a state of purity and innocence.
The serpent, which "was more cunning than all the animals of the field that the Lord God created," by tricks and cunning convinced Eve to try the fruit of the forbidden Tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil. Eve refuses, referring to God, who forbade them to eat from this tree and promised death to anyone who eats this fruit. The serpent tempts Eve, promising that, having tasted the fruit, people will not die, but will become Gods who know Good and Evil. It is known that Eve could not stand the temptation and committed the first sin.
Why does the serpent act as a symbol of evil?
The serpent is an important image in the ancient pagan religions. Due to the fact that snakes shed their skin, they were often personified with rebirth, including the natural cycles of life and death. Therefore, the image of the snake was used in fertility rituals, especially those associated with seasonal cycles.
For the Jewish people, the snake was a symbol of polytheism and paganism, natural enemy Yahweh and monotheism.
Why did the Sinless Eve allow herself to be deceived by the serpent?
Comparison, albeit indirect, of man and God, led to the appearance of theomachistic moods and curiosity in the soul of Eve. It is these sentiments that push Eve to the deliberate transgression of God's commandment.
The cause of the fall of Adam and Eve was their free will. Violation of the commandment of God was only offered to Adam and Eve, but not imposed. Both husband and wife participated in their fall by their own free will, for outside free will there is no sin and no evil. The devil only excites to sin, and does not force it.
History of the Fall.
Lucas Cranach the Elder. Adam and Eve Adam and Eve, unable to withstand the temptation they were subjected to by the devil (the Serpent), committed the first sin. Adam, carried away by his wife, violated the commandment of God and ate from the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Thus Adam and Eve incurred the wrath of the Creator. The first sign of sin was a constant feeling of shame and vain attempts to hide from God. Called by the Creator, they laid the blame: Adam - on the wife, and the wife - on the serpent.
The fall of Adam and Eve is fateful for all mankind. The Fall violated the Divine-human order of life and accepted the Devil-human, people wished to become Gods, bypassing God. By the Fall, Adam and Eve brought themselves into sin, and sin into themselves and all their descendants.
Original sin- rejection by a person of the goal of life determined by God - becoming like God. Original sin contains in germ all the future sins of mankind. Original sin contains the essence of all sin - its origin and nature.
The consequences of the sin of Adam and Eve affected all mankind, who inherited from them human nature corrupted by sin.
Exile from paradise.
God expelled Adam and Eve from paradise so that they would cultivate the land from which Adam was created, and eat the fruits of their labors. Before the exile, God made clothes for people to cover their shame. God placed in the east near the garden of Eden the Cherubim with a flaming sword to guard the way to the tree of life. It is sometimes believed that the archangel Michael, the guard at the gates to paradise, was a cherub armed with a sword. According to the second version, it was the archangel Uriel.
Two punishments awaited Eve and all her daughters after the fall. First, God multiplied Eve's pains in childbirth. Second, God said that relationships between a man and a woman would always be characterized by conflict (Genesis 3:15 - 3:16). These punishments come true over and over again in the life of every woman throughout history. Regardless of all our medical advances, childbirth is always a painful and stressful experience for a woman. And no matter how advanced and progressive our society is, in the relationship between a man and a woman there is a struggle for power and a struggle of the sexes, full of strife.
Children of Adam and Eve.
It is known for certain that Adam and Eve had 3 sons and an unknown number of daughters. The names of the daughters of the ancestors are not recorded in the Bible, since, according to ancient tradition, the genus was in the male line.
The fact that Adam and Eve had daughters is evidenced by the text of the Bible:
The days of Adam after he begat Seth were eight hundred years, and he begat sons and daughters.
The first sons of Adam and Eve were . Cain, out of envy, kills Abel, for which he was expelled and settled separately with his wife. From the Bible it is known about six generations of the Cain tribe, further information is not traced, it is believed that the descendants of Cain died during the Great Flood.
He was the third son of Adam and Eve. Noah was a descendant of Seth.
According to the Bible, Adam lived for 930 years. According to Jewish legend, Adam rests in Judea, next to the patriarchs, according to Christian legend - on Golgotha.
The fate of Eve is unknown, however, in the apocryphal "Life of Adam and Eve" it is said that Eve dies 6 days after the death of Adam, having managed to bequeath to her children to carve the history of the life of the first people on stone.
Original sin in Orthodoxy is one of those provisions that is unclear to a person who is just beginning to get acquainted with Christian doctrine. About what it is, what are its consequences for all of us, and also what interpretations of original sin exist in different branches of Orthodoxy, you can learn from this article.
What is original sin?
At first glance, this looks absurd: in the Christian tradition, it is believed that a child is born into the world with an already damaged human nature. How can this happen if he has not yet had time to commit sins, if only because he has not yet entered a conscious age? In fact, the problem is different: the essence of original sin lies in the fact that each person is born into the world initially damaged (primarily in the spiritual sense, but not only) due to the act of the first ancestor Adam. It was through him, as you know, that a spiritual disease entered the world, which all his descendants inherit.
Many people make the mistake of trying to explain what original sin is. We should not assume that in this case we are responsible for the fact that Adam and Eve ate the fruit from the tree of knowledge. Everything is not so literal, and if you read the holy fathers, this will become clear. Adam's sin is no longer our sin, the fact is that for us it consists in human mortality. As follows from the Bible, the Lord God told Adam that he would die if he ate the forbidden fruit, and the serpent - that he and Eve would become equal to God. The serpent-tempter did not deceive the first people, but together with the knowledge of the world they became mortal - this is the main consequence of original sin. Thus, this sin was not transmitted to other people, but had disastrous results for them.
Consequences of Adam and Eve's sin
Theologians believe that the results were so hard and painful precisely because God's original commandment was easy to follow. If Adam and Eve really wanted to fulfill it, they could easily refuse the offer of the tempter and remain in paradise forever - pure, holy, sinless and, of course, immortal. What is original sin? Like any sin, it is disobedience to the Creator. In fact, Adam created death with his own hands, moving away from God and subsequently mired in it.
His act not only brought death into his life, but also clouded the initially crystal clear human nature. She became distorted, more prone to other sins, love for the Creator was replaced by fear of him and his punishment. John Chrysostom pointed out that before the animals bowed before Adam and saw him as a master, but after being expelled from paradise, they ceased to recognize him.
Thus, man from the highest creation of God, pure and beautiful, turned himself into dust and dust, which his body will become after inevitable death. But, as follows from the Bible, after the first ancestors ate the fruit from the tree of knowledge, they hid from the Lord, not only because they began to fear his wrath, but also because they felt guilty before him.
What happened before original sin
Before the fall, Adam and Eve had a very close relationship with the Lord. In a sense, they were one with him, their souls were so deeply connected with God. Even the saints do not have such a connection, especially other Christians who are not so sinless. Therefore, it is extremely difficult for us to understand it. However, this does not mean that this union does not need to be sought.
The man was a reflection of God's image, and his heart was blameless. The original sin of the first ancestors is called before him; they did not know other sins and were absolutely pure.
How to escape the consequences
Baptism does not deliver from original sin, as is commonly believed. It only gives a person the opportunity to become a different, true Christian. After baptism, a person remains mortal, enclosed in a mortal body shell, and at the same time has an immortal soul. It is important not to destroy it, because, according to the Orthodox tradition, at the end of time there will come Last Judgment where it will become clear what fate awaits each soul.
Thus, baptism helps to restore the lost connection with God, albeit not fully. In any case, original sin made the essence of man more inclined to evil than to good, as it was originally, and therefore it is extremely difficult to reunite with the Creator in this world. However, judging by the examples of the saints, apparently, it is possible.
In essence, this is precisely why baptism is obligatory for those who consider themselves Christians - only in this way, and in no other way, can they be together with God and be saved from the death of their souls.
Original sin in Protestantism
It is worth understanding what original sin is in the understanding of Protestants, namely Calvinists. They, unlike the Orthodox, believe that the consequences of Adam's sin are not only the death of all his descendants, but also their inevitable bearing of guilt for the sin of their ancestor. For this, every person, in their opinion, deserves punishment. Human nature in Calvinism is thoroughly corrupted and saturated with sinfulness.
This view most closely matches the Bible, although it is puzzling.
Original sin in Catholicism
Catholics believe that the sin of the original people is disobedience and weak trust in the Creator. This event caused a large number of different consequences: Adam and Eve lost the favor of God, as a result, the relationship between the two of them was broken. Previously pure and sinless, they have become lustful and tense. This reverberated in other people with moral and physical damage. However, Catholics believe in the possibility of his correction and redemption.
